The way was a steep upward struggle, and it would have been faster by half to cut straight through the woods as Rue often did. But she could sense Jonah’s nervousness as a twitching hand at her side. He kept peering into the thick knit of gathered trees, double-checking every shadow he saw. Likely the white woman had given him a fright. He hadn’t had any way of being sure of where she meant to lead him. Jonah’d followed her anyway, for Rue’s sake.
“She went away north and come back? Miss Varina?”
Rue shook her head, no.
“Don’t say she been among us all this time.”
“Since the House burned,” Rue admitted. “That ol’ church was meant to house a minister. She got all the things she need.”
Jonah let go of her hand. His face crinkled up in wonderment. “Ol’ Joel. He done saw it all clear.”
“Not all clear,” Rue said quick. “Ain’t no hoodoo involved.”
“Just lies.”
She shrugged. Jonah should have long ago lost the ability to make her feel the fool. She had kept him safe all these years, and everybody else too.
“You feed Miss Varina?” Jonah asked. “Clothe her? All this time? Like a li’l child?” Rue nodded.
“What if she fell sick?”
“She was sick for a long while,” Rue said, and in saying she could almost smell again the acrid stink of laudanum, hear the clink of the syrup-sticky vials that Varina had sucked from the way she had used to suck at her thumb as a girl.
“She near-about died. But she come back to life.” Rue looked to Jonah, but she was thinking of Bean. “And now she’s wantin’ after things again. It makes her bold.”
“How’d you keep her hid this long?” Jonah wanted to know.
“She believed when I tol’ her it wasn’t safe to go out. She believed when I tol’ her she’d get out of there soon. She believed in me,” Rue said. “Everybody did.”
Now Jonah fell dumb silent and Rue asked a question of her own, one that had been pounding at her. “Jonah. You ain’t tell her the war was done when you met her?”
“No, I did not.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I ain’t in the business of tellin’ white women they wrong,” he said. “Why didn’t you never tell her? Now or all them years ago?”
Rue had thought on an answer to that question for years. Chewed on the question and tossed and turned on it, sleepless at night, coming up with kindness as an answer on some days and rage as an answer on others. She could have said to Jonah that Varina didn’t have any living relations save a spinster aunt up north that she’d never known. She could have said that Varina, opium-blind, had been too fragile to accept the South’s surrender ’til the lie told to comfort her was too old to alter. Rue could have said that the world would not be kind to a disgraced belle who’d never been expected to even bathe herself. She could have said that Varina would have reclaimed her home, or what was left of it, would have turned her slaves into her workers, paid them in scraps and promises like nothing had ever changed, a different name for the same thing. She could have said that Varina deserved it, deserved only to see the light of day in small gasps, to prowl the woods only safely unseen at night, that Varina deserved to still have nightmares of her brothers dead on battlefields and of exploding cannonballs and of Yankee devils with cloven feet. That Varina deserved it all, deserved to be locked up, left to stay waiting and praying after a glory that wasn’t ever going to come.
All of those things were true but what Rue did say to Jonah was true most of all: “I just didn’t want her to leave.”
EXODUS
1872
Rue had herself some nightmares. Haunted dreams in which her dead baby was a part of a collection. A pickled curiosity on